Diablo 3 Forum Watch #74: Auction Houses and Class Choices

While the most common interpretation of Bashiok’s recent cryptic comment is that the Diablo III beta will not be starting in early August, the whiff of the approaching beta, imminent or not, has clearly increased interest in the game. Our Diablo 3 forums continue to grow busier and busier, with lots of new and returning readers keeping the threads hopping. This post only highlights a small percentage of the new conversations, but they’re a good place to start if you’re not already reading the forum regularly.

Stewie wants to know if playing in the beta would change your first character choice. I don’t see how it couldn’t, but I think the more interesting issue relates to how many people already have their first character choice chiseled in stone. Especially people who haven’t played yet! I’ve played all available chars at the last 3 Blizzcons, and I have no idea who I’ll play first, with 4 classes still vying for my first love.

Exile wants you to grade Blizzard PR’s efforts so far with Diablo III. There are a lot more Ds than Bs, but I think N/A is the most appropriate grade, since all of us, by virtue of caring enough about the game to post in a fansite forum, are proving ourselves to not be the targets of Blizzard’s casual-hunting, social media-focused, sporadic PR efforts.

For some reason Auction House/trading system speculation/debate has blown up over the past week. There’s a lot of skepticism that a WoW style AH can work in D3, since Rare and Crafted items will have so many possible modifiers, and since there will be a nearly-infinite number of items for trade on a large realm. BigAl isn’t sure if it’ll work, Xavier is sure it will not, and TVC suggests an AH just for non-random items like gems, materials, and runes. I don’t see why an AH is so tricky for D3; eBay seems to work pretty well with every possible item on earth for sale; players just need enough sorting options to find more or less what they want.

Ibizur started a thread for people to dream up cool new boss monster modifiers. We already know about twenty of the boss mods in D3, but I certainly hope there are many more that we’ve yet to see. Perhaps even some as inventive as the ones in this thread.

JaMonk’s poll asks just how difficult you want Hell to be. Most people say they’re masochists, but can we take that at face value? Or does it just mean that we all want other people to suffer through Hell, while we glide along on the wings of seraphim, Hoovering up the l3wts while schadenfreuding over the cries of dismay rising all around us?

Chaboi wonders if characters will get geared up in one-quarter the time (compared to D2) thanks to the individual drops in D3. Most replies argue no, while others point out that there are just too many unknown variables to make any definitive answer on this question.

See the Diablo III Community Forum for these and many more.Talking; it helps to pass the time!

Even outside the desires of us the endlessly info-craving hardcore fan base, Blizz’s PR – which, outside of Blizzcon, has largely consisted of sporadic concept art – has to be seen as pretty weak. SCII, for example, had three or four PvP battle report videos with commentary. I don’t think asking for one similar video in a new arena level is asking a whole lot. Specially one involving the DH and monk who have never been seen in PvP.

If I would have to guess I would say it’s because SC2 is less of a new game compared to SC1 than D3 to D2. Because of this the basic gameplay of the new StarCraft was probably finished well before the game was ready to ship and the devs could show us much more ingame footage during the long balancing phase, which was necessary due to eSports.

With D3 it’s the other way around. The gameplay of it will be very much different compared to D2, and it will require less balancing than SC2. Because of this Blizzard was less inclined to show gameplay footage (I’m actually surprised they showed as much as they did), because they won’t necessarily represent the final game.

Barbarian is my last choice, since I find that char play style fairly boring at the low levels. It was the same in D2; I liked high level Barbs, but the click click click of melee hits until I got to Frenzy or WW turned my hair white.

Happily, the D3 Barb is much more varied at lower levels, and Cleave is a great skill since it hits multiple enemies if they’re all crowded together. But still, I find him the least compelling of the 5 at the start.

Ironically, I’m sure I won’t play a Barb last. I’ll probably do 2 or 3 others that I really want to do, and then hit the Barb once I’ve twinked him some shiny toys, since I do want to try out his higher level skills and experience the tanking style of gameplay.